It was 20 years ago today – no this is not the opening to The Beatles song,Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, but it was 20 years ago today that Hurricane Hugo struck just north of Charleston, SC, in the middle of the night and then proceeded to rip a path through South Carolina – all the way up through Charlotte, NC, at 100mph. Pictures from space showed the size of Hugo covered the entire state of SC – it was a big mother.
The joke back then was that weather forecasters used to say that when a hurricane hits the mainland its strength tends to fizzle out – not this time. We live in Bonneau, SC, in Berkeley County – about 45 minutes northwest of Charleston – at least 30 feet above sea level – so we had no worries about storm surge that far inland. The only problem was Hurricane Hugo didn’t know about that fizzling out thing. But, we still had an office in downtown Charleston on East Bay Street, a half a block from Charleston harbor – so we had big worries about our office space. We were still running IF Labs, a custom black and white photo processing business and were two years into our new business – Charleston Arts, a newspaper about the arts community in Charleston. That’s right, back then we covered all the arts.
Linda and I had been through some close-call hurricanes when we lived in downtown Charleston. She was from Myrtle Beach, SC, and had been in hurricanes all her life – I was a transplanted Yankee from Michigan and from what I saw of them – they were kinda cool – Mother Nature’s fury and all that. Of course we were renters back then. We used to go down to the Battery in Charleston and watch the waves crash against the wall – during those close-call hurricanes. Hurricane Hugo was directed right at us, a more powerful storm, we now were home owners, had a two-year old son, and with an office almost on the harbor – this was different – not so cool.
We did all the things you are suppose to do in preparation for a hurricane and then waited. We didn’t think about evacuation back then – remember we were 30 ft. above sea level, 45 minutes inland and the fizzle factor, but we learned a lesson that night.
Long nightmare short. During the middle of the storm a very large pine tree in our backyard decided it might be safer to come inside the house – entering through the roof, we ended up huddled in a hallway with a mattress over our heads singing children’s songs to drown out the noise until we all fell asleep. The next morning we could not recognize our neighborhood – couldn’t even find the road in front of our house. Life as we knew it a few days before would be over for years.
You don’t want to hear about dealing with insurance companies, FEMA, and waiting in lines for everything – it’s not a pretty story.
Our office in Charleston? It took a week or so before we could even get into Charleston to check it our, but amazingly enough we learned where we were located in Charleston was one of the highest points in the city. The historic building had walls that were nearly two feet thick and we just suffered a little bit of leaking around a couple of windows – no real damage – except there was no business for our businesses.
Our Oct. 89 issue of Charleston Arts was at our printer – they lost the roof of their building and that copy of the paper. We ended up doing a few 8 1/2″ x 11″ pages, copied at Kinkos, of info about the storm and its impact on the art community which was shut down for almost a year. Our headline was – Hurricane Hugo the Art Critic.
The final word is – we survived, recovered and learned some lessons about insurance, good neighbors, FEMA, and hurricanes that fizzle when they hit mainland. The next hurricane with Charleston’s name on it – we went as far as Alabama to get out of its way. And, a Thank You! shout out to the workers who drove up from Jacksonville, FL, from Florida Power and Light who came and restored power to our community in a few weeks instead of the months it would have taken our local power company to put things back together – and an upgrade on equipment too. They worked long hard hours to give us power.
Hurricane Hugo was no Hurricane Katrina, but when it comes to hurricanes – there are no good ones. I’m glad we have had none come our way this year – knock on wood till November. An experience like that should be good for a hundred years.